The Facilitative Coach Workshop
Co-authored By Dale Schwarz and Anne Davidson

The Facilitative Coach workshop builds your ability to guide others through career and personal change to achieve new levels of success and fulfillment. It extends the Skilled Facilitator approach for effective human interaction into a comprehensive nine-part coaching model. Using the model as a foundation for sound coaching theory and practice, you learn how to expand your personal development as a coach and extend the types and depth of your interventions with clients. We focus on your personal development as one key to effective coaching and introduce coaching activities such as visual expression, writing and real-life experiments that expand your own and your clients’ ways of knowing what you most want to achieve. If you implement the learning you get with us, you will be able to help clients shift their beliefs and behaviors to achieve specific goals and/or engage in fundamental personal transformation.

The rest of this page lists the outcomes that The Facilitative Coach workshop makes possible for you, and the design and content of the workshop itself. Keep in mind that we work with you to help you maximize the results you get from any of our workshops.

What the Facilitative Coach Workshop Makes Possible For You and Your Clients
In this workshop, you will gain skills to:

Create contracts for coaching work that make positive outcomes much more likely

Increase your clients’ commitment to change by jointly designing the process with them

Help clients make the changes they want by designing and using a variety of interventions, including art, writing and real life experiments.

Give and receive motivating feedback on coaching skills and the coaching process

Help yourself and others change thinking in order to sustain behavior change

Determine whether or not other coaching activities and methods are consistent with your core values

We believe effective coaching demands a comprehensive understanding of the complex coaching process. You’ll learn our nine-part model for coaching and we’ll explore how the parts interrelate to generate purposeful, creative results for your clients. These are the nine parts of our coaching model, and what each makes possible:

1. Coaching Purpose
   Helping people identify and attain their goals by clarifying and deepening the purpose of the coaching relationship.

2. Inner Work of the Coach
   Examining the values you bring to coaching; developing awareness of your gifts and where you get stuck; expanding your capacity for compassion and attending fully to yourself and others.

3. Inner Work of the Client
   Guiding your client to success and fulfillment through interventions that encourage self-awareness, knowledge of gifts and stuck places, and changing thinking to change behaviors.

4. Coaching Relationship
   Co-creating clear roles, boundaries, guidelines and goals with your clients, both at the outset and during the coaching engagement, as a strong foundation for your work together.

5. Guiding Principles
   Articulating broad principles such as integrity, compassion and joint design that explain the purpose and intent of a coaching relationship.

6. Ground Rules
   Applying the principles of the Skilled Facilitator approach to improve your coaching dialogues and help your clients act consistently with core values.

7. Process Steps
   Following a logical set of steps to help you and your client move effectively through each coaching session and the entire coaching relationship.

8. Diagnosis and Intervention
   Identifying critical issues with your coaching clients and jointly designing ways to address them. We introduce a variety of expressive techniques that help you and your client access both effective and ineffective thinking and behavior patterns.

9. Foundation Theories
   Understanding the fundamental concepts that guide facilitative coaching, including distinctions between espoused theory and theory-in-use, Mutual Learning and Unilateral Control, the creative and survival cycles and the roles of the drama triangle. We will demonstrate how these theories support and enhance one another, allowing you to more successfully diagnose client dilemmas and design interventions to address them.

Workshop Design
This is a highly experiential three-day workshop. It combines short instructor introductions for each facet of The Facilitative Coach with exercises, guided skill practice, and feedback from us and your peers. You will be invited to conduct art, writing and dialogue activities in pairs and small groups and to share your insights with the full group. Personal reflection and self-assessment are important components of each activity. We will provide guidelines to help you adapt our exercises for work with your future coaching clients, but you will learn initially by experimenting with activities yourself and using them for your own learning. The exercises are structured enough to address key coaching issues and flexible enough to allow you to individualize them to your own practice. No previous art or writing experience is needed or expected. You will also be asked to bring and use examples from your own experiences to practice your skills.

As with other Skilled Facilitator workshops, you will be asked to complete a few hours of preparation before attending. Short readings or practice activities will also be assigned for each of the first two evenings of the workshop.

Who Should Attend
We’ve designed this workshop for facilitators, consultants, trainers and coaches who have experience working with groups and individuals and who want to expand into one-on-one coaching or deepen the impact of their coaching work. This would be an ideal experience for you if you are a Human Resources and Organizational Development professional who either coaches peers, subordinates and leaders in your organization, or if you coach external clients. Being familiar with The Skilled Facilitator approach is helpful, but not necessary to get value from the class.

Testimonials from the First Facilitative Coach Workshop
“You have something unique here that I haven’t seen in other coaching programs. You have a foundation and model as a way to help people, not just a set of behaviors.” Charles Elligson

“Effective coaching is like having someone hold up ‘the most reflective mirror.’ Thank you for the insights, the learnings, and the reflections.” Barbara Lansche.

“A very productive and personally rewarding workshop. I will be more effective professionally and personally as a result of the workshop. Both Anne and Dale set the stage for and fostered an open, candid forum for learning and personal growth.” Tom Pagels

“What a wonderful workshop! I gained so much from the sessions – Anne and Dale took me in many directions, gave insights and tools. I immediately started putting the skills to use with my own coaching clients.” Nancy Rudisill

“Thanks for a great three days! The Facilitative Coach workshop is a chance to be self-reflective and grow while learning to help others to be self-reflective and grow. I highly recommend this workshop!"

If you are interested in learning more about the Facilitative Coach Workshop, or exploring whether and how it might be right for you and your organization, please contact Dale Schwartz or Schwarz & Associates.

The Facilitative Coach Workshop is a chapter of the The Skilled Facilitator Fieldbook by Roger Schwarz, Anne Davidson, Sue Mckinney, Peg Carlson and Contributors. Dale Schwartz is an associate of this firm.  For more information or to purchase this resource, go to www.schwarzassociates.net